First we had mind-blowing water simulation. Now we can add another delightfully realistic simulation to the mix: snow.
The GIF above comes from a Disney animation presentation on new snow simulation techniques used for the upcoming film Frozen. Some of the concepts might go over your head, but no worries: it’s evident they’re making strides with this tech, given how great the snow looks. Watch:
And here’s the trailer for Frozen, in case you haven’t seen it before:
Man. Now I wanna go play in the snow.
Comments
10 responses to “Disney’s Computer-Simulated Snow Basically Looks Real”
I want snow now 🙁 Why does it have to be summer here 🙁
It had to be asked: So how long till games get this kind of gfx?
GFX hehe… VFX like this are next next gen stuff if we are very lucky. Hard to say when exactly we will get stuff like this in our Halo’s and Elder Scroll’s though. Real time game engines do have a tendency for faking simulations like this without using as much power though so you never know.
It’s hard to draw an equivalent between real time graphics cards and what you see in these animated films.
The animation, rendering and simulation software are written differently from real time graphics cards to non real time rendering. They are trying to achieve different ends.
It’s why your graphics card is technically be able to render the movie Shrek in real time, but you don’t really get that. You play a game like Crysis 3. You get a bunch of stuff rendered and done way ahead of what was done in shrek, while having a bunch of things not done as well. There’s trades off to what they need to do, what they aim to do.
Also the time and effort put into building environments, characters and animations is different. Games are built for time, efficiency and space requirements.
I assume this is pre-rendered.
That’s garbage. It doesn’t look at all like the snow at Thredbo.
you mean the ice at Thredbo?
Yeah. I don’t see any ciggie ends either… lies.
Yeah, it’s all well and good and it looks pretty nice. It’s just that the picture would take probably a few days to simulated and hours to render.
It also looks like mashed potatoe.
Is it just me, or does it seem like Disney and Pixar creates their animation tech first, then comes up with a movie concept to use it in? The scene in Toy Story 3 where the characters are crawling around in debris screamed “look at our new small body physics simulation!!” to me.